


All My Chances Again

by hitlikehammers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And Doing It Right This Time, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame Fix-It, Fix-It, Fluff, Love Confessions, M/M, Other, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Reliving the Past, Schmoop, Taking Missed Chances, Time Travel, What a Century's Worth of Love Looks Like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-01-31 15:18:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 20,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18593938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: I love him, Steve thinks into the spiralling ether;I love him; let me tell him. Give me the chance to set that one thing right. If I can’t rest for saving him, let me give him all of me and hope that it’s enough.Or; Steve gets lost in the time matrix, and begs for an out. Seems confession is good for the soul—or so he hopes.Avengers: EndgameFix-It





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> So: that movie happened last night. I had a lot of Strong Opinions©. STRONG. Opinions.
> 
> This is what happened after.
> 
> It is also [Dido's fault](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAKtWaPK0_M), but mostly it's because of that fucking movie and my Strong Opinions©.
> 
> Fucking movie.

Steve won’t pretend that traveling within the time matrix doesn’t fuck with him down to the very marrow in his bones.

All of the missteps, all of the little failures, all of the times he would now turn left instead of turning right like he did back then; seeing himself and the others, all of the others, all that they’ve lost: it throws him. Hard. In the end, when the final step presents itself to take, he knows, somewhere deep down, that he won’t survive the fall. He achieves the mission, or else he hopes he does: works backwards from a clear starting point so as not to make any mistakes, not to step in the same river twice and that shit, and he keeps his head down and replaces what needs to go back because bending time, he’s suspected, was going to come and bite them in the ass. It _felt_ wrong just _being_ in the quantum stream, it wasn’t natural. 

He mostly suspects this last trip is one way, as it should have been long ago, and he works very, _very_ hard not to dwell on the last words, rehashed lines with so little meaning anymore; he tries very hard not to dwell on the last time he ever saw—

He didn’t plan on making it out of this alive.

Which is why he’s goddamn shaken, and frankly a little pissed off, when he ends up back in the web of possibilities, of wrong choices, of flickering lights and tunneled motion and branching potentiality, static and speed and relentless pressure as he skitters through the vastness of an entire dimension of existence; wrong, because no one should be able to do this, no matter how grateful he may be, or have been, or will be for the chance: this was and still remains set against everything he knows to be true in the universe, the capacity even of this, fucking traveling the tides of time and yet it’s also the capacity that cost them so much, that gave him back his teammates, his friends, his—

The love of his life. Because if he’s never been able to say it before, he’ll damn well say it now, in the crushing-spinning nothingness, when he has nothing left to lose.

And it doesn’t stop, doesn’t fade; he ponders, for an instant or two, whether this is just remnants, aftershock and overload as the last of the life is drained from him but it doesn’t stop, and he’s never gone this long stuck in it without a destination, even if he didn’t know where he’d land. There’s no sense of directionality to it, at least not for him, and Lang hadn’t said it out loud but Steve could connect the dots: that’s bad. If there is an endpoint, a destination, he doesn’t understand it, and hell if he even tries. Except it doesn’t stop; it doesn’t stop and Steve doesn’t think he can take any more of it, and so he begs something bigger than himself for an out, any out: nothing.

He’s desperate, he’s shaking as much as he can in this centrifugal void, he thinks he’ll be sick or come apart from his bones, veins bursting to join the swirl of the onslaught: he thinks he’s sobbing, but there’s too much rushing for tears, to even feel them properly—he’s _desperate_ by the time he starts to ask for a specific out, for a specific saving grace as if a specific one’s meant to work better than flailing for anything: but this one’s selfish, because if nothing’s going to work, what’s the harm in it, what’s the shame in asking to think of him, to bring him to mind and maybe find some comfort in it—what’s the harm?

 _I love him_ , Steve thinks into the spiralling ether; _I love him; let me tell him. Give me the chance to set that one thing right. If I can’t rest for saving him, let me give him all of me and hope that it’s enough_.

Steve feels a lurch, and thinks this is it, this is the end, and he closes his eyes.

Whatever comes: he doesn’t think he wants to see it. 

He doesn’t think he can; things are slowing, and the tears are gathering now, heavy on his lashes and making it hard to blink.

He cannot see.


	2. 1932

He’s the one watching as much as he’s the one choking. It’s not the same as the other times, with a mission, when watching himself was only an exercise of witness and judge, lament and regret. No: he knows both where he comes from, and where he is.

He remembers this.

“Stevie, come on,” the hand pressed atop his own grips him tighter; it belongs to the voice, a voice nearer to Steve’s consciousness, Steve’s soul than his own. “Breathe, pal, just breathe.”

It’s pleading. It’s _begging_ , and the Steve of right now wonders how he ever shook in the face of it, how he ever made the man he loves most _beg_ for him; how was he so weak to cause it, and so strong to not bend to the command of it like orienting toward the sun.

“Please,” Bucky says softly, tightly, just this side of wet, caught in his throat. ”Please, I can’t,” Bucky shakes his head, and it shivers in his touch on Steve’s clammy hand.

“I can’t lose you,” his head is bowed and Steve can feel his breath on his knuckles; Steve never noticed that before, too lost to fever and the pall of the reaper he was so familiar with, but now, his former consciousness overlain with his present self, he feels it. It’s intimate in a way Steve doesn’t recall, that may have changed everything if Steve had been brave. 

“What if I lose you, what would I do?” Bucky asks it, almost indignant. “Whose place would I go to after school, huh? Whose scrawny hide would I pull out of scraps he’s too stubborn and stupid to duck out of?”

The scent of hospital is overwhelming, the sharp, acrid reek of it, of the time and of Steve’s mangled, veiled recollections of all the times he’d been bad enough to merit the waste of money and end up there: it fills his senses, making his present self cringe but alongside it, closer and welcome and sweet, is the way that Bucky smells: sweat and musk and perfect.

That, Steve remembers so fucking clearly it almost scares him.

“Who am I, if I’m not Steve Rogers’ best friend?” Bucky murmurs, so softly that the Steve in the bed then wouldn’t have picked it up, but the Steve lingering nearby, inside that small frame—small, but maybe bigger, stronger where it really counted, where he’s lost so much of who he is, who he was from his soul; that smaller-but-maybe-better version of himself, left behind so long again in the flesh—that version hears it loud and clear, the tremble in it undeniable.

“Need you, Steve,” Bucky breathes; “I know it’s hard, but I need you, and you know how selfish I can be,” and he says it straight, no artifice or lightness to it, and it’s such a lie: Bucky’s the most giving person Steve’s ever met, and he wishes he had the strength, or else the capacity to move his former limbs and smack Bucky’s arm in denial of that claim, that falsehood against god and the universe and the spinning of the globe. 

“And I know how bull-headed you can be, so,” Bucky breathes out gentle, like he’s afraid he’ll disturb something vital, shake something loose that could mean the end of everything: the stillness or the needing, or maybe like he’ll somehow rob Steve of the precious oxygen he can barely take in when he mouths more than speaks: 

“ _Please_.”

And Steve’s heart’s long learned, even by that point in his life, what it means to try and burst for love of Bucky Barnes. But for it to break for him, for the heartbreak in _his_ voice and the way he’s damn near curled in on himself at Steve’s bedside: Steve doesn’t know what to do with that. His heart isn’t prepared for it, hasn’t learned. Even the heart in him that knows how to break for losing him—always _losing_ him—doesn’t know how to break for _this_.

“I manage to keep you safe from everything else, at least in the end,” Bucky whispers, and it’s so choked that Steve can’t even swallow. “Maybe you’re worse for wear, sure, but you’re _safe_ ,” and goddamnit, Bucky huffs around the emotion; tries to hide it either for pride or practicality—he shouldn’t be there, no one can be allowed to find a scrappy teenager on the brink of shattering at some always-dying boy’s side, and Steve doesn’t think he ever understood or asked how he _was_ there, every time Steve ended up in the hospital, sneaking in late at night while Steve’s ma turned a blind eye, or so Steve guessed whenever he did think of it—but for the numerous times that Steve’s broken down in Bucky’s presence and felt both shame and relief for it, in all the years Steve can remember, he’d never seen Bucky cry, not once.

Maybe he just never paid attention; or never could. He’s not sure it matters which.

“Why can’t I keep you safe from _this_?” And those words tremble, those words shake and Steve can’t take it, Steve can’t stand it so he closes his eyes and wills the body he still feels, in this odd commingling, more at home than he probably should; he wills it to take some of his strength and to rouse, to wake, to stop this thread in Bucky from unravelling any further on Steve’s account because he cannot _take_ it, he can’t bear it any more.

“Buck?” His voice is scratchy, barely there; unused and throat dry and he can guess which time this was, which illness in his early teens landed him here, but he doesn’t know for sure; he shivers, and it feels like it takes the whole of his being to contain just that tiny motion, but Steve _makes_ himself move the hand under Bucky’s, makes himself hook that hand’s thumb with his own when Bucky tries to pull away before Steve can notice.

“Steve?” Bucky says, voice filled with hope and awe and all the things Steve doesn’t deserve. “Steve, are you,” he scoots his chair closer, and if his hand had tried to escape maybe he makes a conscious choice to give up trying, but it looks, it feels more like muscle memory and carved out innate _need_ when Bucky reaches and lets his fingers play with the sweat-slick clumps of hair on Steve’s forehead as he checks his fever deftly.

“What can I do, what can I get you, just stay, breathe, y’know,” Bucky’s talking to make sure the quiet doesn’t come back, Steve recognizes that now; Bucky’s scared, of what the silence means, and so many things make more sense in the light of that, now. So many things. 

“Just breathe. Don’t,” his voice catches and his expression threatens to crumble; Steve then would have still had bleary eyes and never would have noticed, but Steve now, sharing his skin, sees it, and hears it, and prays it means what he needs it to mean—”don’t stop.”

“Bucky,” Steve grinds out, eyes fluttering as he tries to force them open. “C’mere,” and his hand hooked in Bucky’s pulls a little, and Bucky’s eyes snap down to their joined fingers and he looks bewildered and unmoored but holds on just the same.

“Gotta tell you something.” 

“It can wait, pal,” Bucky assures him, and Steve registers then that his hand hasn’t left Steve’s face, now on the side of it, and Bucky really cannot be found here, like this, but there’s something in his posture, his expression that makes it clear that he’s beyond worrying about that, even though it should be foremost in his mind, and he’s _beyond_ that, this reckless teenage version of Steve’s heart and soul; he’s beyond that solely because of Steve. 

“Just focus on breathing okay, steady and slow, yeah? I can get someone—”

“Can’t wait.” Steve makes himself choke out; “Gotta tell you…”

“Steve—”

“Gotta, Bucky,” he pushes through, like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do except it can’t be, he has to _say_ it, not just convince Bucky to listen and then give out; he’s travelled time and space to make it so that James Buchanan Barnes knows that Steve’s whole sense of being, sense of self is made of loving him more than the world. “I’ve _got_ to, you’ve gotta—”

And the coughing should have been expected, Steve’s foolish to have missed it, overlooked the inevitability, but it does come as a surprise, and wracks him all the more fully as a result. His body is heaving for the force of it, and Bucky’s eyes are wide, scared again, and maybe it’s not just the silence that frightens him; maybe it’s just the threat of it becoming a permanent state of affairs.

Steve knows the feeling too well. 

“Anything.” And Bucky changes his tone again, back closer to begging but this time it’s a soothing sort, a plaintive sort of sound: “You know that, punk, you can tell me anything, always.”

And Bucky’s hand is still on his, and the other is on Steve’s back rubbing steadily, easing him through the last of the coughing, the rasping in his lungs and Steve forgot what this felt like in such a visceral way, maybe, but feeling it again is a perverse coming-home.

“It _is_ hard,” Steve confesses, more honest than he’s ever been in a church, straight from his heart as he makes himself focus his eyes and look at Bucky, meet his gaze and really _look_ : “it’s harder than almost anything.” And he doesn’t have to clarify, doesn’t have to defend having heard Bucky’s musings now where he’d never heard them before in the midst of the worse of whatever illness had lain him low: Bucky told him he knew that it was hard, and Steve, this time, in this body with a mind outside, heard loud and clear.

So it’s only fair, only _right_ that Steve respond in kind.

“But what’s harder, what would be harder than this, than keeping at it, keeping going,” Steve struggles to speak, to get enough air so he makes it quick, so he can be sure it all manages to come out, even if it’s in the space of gasps. 

“It’d be harder, leaving you,” Steve tells him, bares his heart raw. “I’m selfish, too,” though that commiserating is still a lie; Steve _is_ selfish, to Bucky’s giving heart; “and it would be harder. It would hurt more.”

Bucky just stares at him, somewhere between hanging on his every word and not believing they’re real, maybe even that Steve’s real: that this isn't all just a dream.

Steve’s not entirely sure either, but he knows in his bones either way what he’s here to do. 

“I keep fighting, for you,” Steve forces out, and it’s entirely the him of the now who makes it come from cracked lips and burning lungs; it has to be, because the other him is too spent, but also because that’s why he’s here. To make it right, to take the leap where he’d failed before.

“I keep breathing, for _you_ ,” and Steve hopes like hell Bucky can read between the lines, and know all the things those words mean in between the flutter of Steve’s pulse, from the very depths of his soul.

“Steve,” Bucky starts, voice low and slow and his head shaking back and forth in half-measures like he can’t decide if that’s what he wants to do, wants to say with the language of his body at all. “You don’t…”

“Bucky.”

And Steve’s as steady, as sure in that single name as he’s ever been in anything, and it lasts for enough moments that Steve can gather the energy to lace his fingers all the way through Bucky’s now, and make it as clear as he can on his end, to convince Bucky as strong as it’s possible to, to try and make it known.

The coughing takes over again, soon enough, but Steve just bears down and squeezes Bucky’s hand with a strength that comes from another time, and a life’s worth of losing and needing now to _hold_.

“Steady breaths,” Bucky coaches him, careful and practiced. “Okay? Easy,” he matches his own breathing quick to Steve’s hitching gasps and once the worst of the coughing just turns into panting, he slowly models coming down from the ledge. “Easy, steady breaths.”

And if Bucky shifts just so, and raises Steve’s hand in his own; if Steve back then maybe wouldn’t have felt it, or seen it for the way that his eyes close after the exertion of just words: where he'd have missed it, the Steve of the now sees Bucky angle his body so that no one can see when he lifts Steve’s hand to his mouth and brushes lips against his fingers, delicate: just so.

Steve from then, and from now, breathes out something bigger than he knows how to speak, maybe bigger than he knows how to feel, and he’s feeling the pull of something cosmic, and his heart breaks to see no more, to make sure that Steve remembers, that Bucky’s mouth reaches Steve’s hand again, Steve’s lips in time: he wasn't meant to make _sure_ , it seems, but if this is what he gets, if this is the second chance he gets to set in motion then okay.

Okay, he can rest now. A Steve who loves Bucky, and knows it through and through out loud, would never stand to lose him. Not ever.

He has to believe that, with everything he is, and he has to believe he’s put things right.

If he forgets to breathe a _thank you_ to the universe for the chance before he’s whisked away from the frailty in his former body, well.

He’s not going to apologize for it, when instead he can watch Bucky’s face, watch him breathe and _be_ just a little longer.


	3. 1934

Steve does not expect to wake up—to anything. His unfinished business was dealt with, he’d taken the chance given and made the best he possibly could of it, to change the tides and speak aloud secrets that never should have gone with him to the grave. He’d been grateful, and he’d been ready to accept the inevitable.

So the harsh sting of a busted lip and the swelling of a black eye, back inside his smaller body and trudging angrily—if a little off-balance, with his shirt ruched up to press against a cut bleeding steady on his cheek—into the Barnes’ kitchen is a surprise, to say the least.

“You dumb fucking punk,” Bucky seethes, bites out at him from where he leads the way and looks by the sink to find a clean towel to wet. “I cannot believe you, no, wait, I can _absolutely_ believe you and that’s what’s worse,” he tears strips off him, and Steve remembers enough to know this is harsher, this is angrier and seething stronger than usual, more than Bucky usually gives when Steve gets himself into trouble. 

It happened so often, after all. He can spot the difference. He wonders how loud his self-righteousness had to have been back then to not have noticed, or else to not have cared; but it was Bucky. Of course he would have cared, at least to the point of it being _Bucky_. 

“Get up on the goddamn counter.”

Steve does as he’s told, then and now. That tone of voice, more a growl than anything, isn’t something Steve ever could ignore.

Though he’s more attuned to the way that it sets fire through him above and beyond the burn of his injuries, and pools hot in his belly, tight in his groin: he’s more aware of that for having accepted in the now that Bucky’s it for him, and always had been.

“Stay there, and don’t fuckin’ move.”

That, too, sends shivers down Steve’s spine that he _knows_ he fought like hell against the first time; Bucky’s already on his way to the bathroom and so he doesn’t fight it one bit, this time around. It’s dangerous. 

It’s glorious. 

“Won’t your parents be home soon?” Steve calls out, because that’s how the dialogue goes when Bucky brings him here. Only when Steve’s own mother isn’t off to work yet, and he’s bad enough off that he’d worry her mind through the whole of her shift, should she lay eyes on him first. “Your sisters?”

Steve waits for the response while he tries to figure out _why_ he’s here in the first place, more metaphysically speaking: didn’t he fix it? Wasn’t that why he hadn’t died for real, right away; hadn’t sacrificed himself as a means to the end, to having earned the privilege of knowing Bucky would breathe another breath in this world: the cost of that fight, once it was won? Hadn't he been given either the task or the gift of making sure Bucky knew, beyond a doubt, how much he was loved? Didn’t it _work_?

“Better than your ma seein’ ya like this,” Bucky’s grousing as he comes back into the room with the first aid kit; Steve’s pretty sure it gets bigger every time he sees it, and he knows it’s because of him, and him alone. He swallows around the shame in that, something he knows he hadn’t felt the full, proper magnitude of the first time around. “I _swear_ , Steve...”

“You swear what?”

Neither the Steve of then nor the Steve of now knows how, or else cares sufficiently, to keep his mouth shut, apparently. Good to know.

“One of these days you’re gonna,” Bucky starts off strong, loud, but loses steam quick, deflating visibly as he trails off: “one of these _days_ —”

It’s a subtle thing, and as much as Steve had felt Bucky in his blood at the age of sixteen, the Steve who’s seen another century picks up something even that thick-skulled teenager would have easily missed: and that’s the hitch in the breath that Steve as a boy wouldn’t have thought to notice, too much hero worship in him to believe Bucky to be vulnerable to overwhelming emotion, particularly in the face of Steve using his fists to hold a conversation, _again_. Steve as a man, though, who knows that vulnerability looks different, and isn't fazed by the ache of his bleeding skin, inured to the feeling of such simple, easy pains by now that they barely exist in his mind, and whose hero worship for Bucky Barnes is so much less about how he can throw punches than it is about how he can _fight_ , heart and soul: _that_ Steve notices. 

“One of these days I’m not gonna be enough, you know,” Bucky says flatly, finally. “I won’t be able to stop ‘em, or I won’t be quick enough, or—“

“That’s a lie.”

Bucky stops dabbing at Steve’s wounds with the antiseptic cotton and the wet cloth and freezes, hands near enough to Steve’s skin so that Steve can feel their warmth. “What did you say?”

“That’s a lie,” Steve repeats. “I can handle myself—”

“Steve—”

“But when I can’t, you’re stronger than any of ‘em,” Steve finishes, because Steve then knows as much as Steve now that he didn’t always have them on the ropes; in fact, it was rare to have them _near_ the ropes, and he was a prideful son of a bitch; it’s just that then, Steve wouldn’t say it—now? Steve doesn’t mind. 

“And I trust you.” That’s the important part; any Steve in any time, any _universe_ , would know that much.

Bucky blinks, watching Steve closely between each flutter of lashes, and swallowing hard so his Adam’s apple bobs and Steve’s throat goes dry for it.

“I,” Bucky fumbles, pauses, unsure whether he wants to proceed; it’s long enough that Steve can feel the pooling of blood as the wound in his cheek starts bleeding again, unattended to for staunching. 

“What if I’m too late, for _you_ ,” Bucky’s voice is low, soft, hoarse when it finally does come, and his eyes are torn from Steve like the words and the gaze can’t coexist, never the twain shall meet. “What if your lungs, or your, your _heart_ —”

“I trust you with that, too.”

Steve doesn’t expect the words to have such an easy in, much as he knows exactly what he feels, and presumes to know exactly why he’s here. But again: any and every Steven Grant Rogers knows that if his heart’s got a chance in hell, it belongs to Bucky Barnes inside that chance.

Bucky’s eyes go straight to his when he says it, and that’s a give away more than anything else, the way those eyes are big and soft and scared. The way they don’t hold any revulsion, or hate in them, almost open to the point where if they even tried to hold either it would just fall out, limbless and dumb.

“What are you sayin’?” And it’s almost poetic, or else just as entrancing, to watch the play in Bucky’s gaze: the attempt to make the question harder than it is, to stand ground and hold firm against the automatic refutation that time and life and people had always told them to stand rooted in with both feet. Goddamn, but Bucky tries, and Steve feels some pull of his former self back down, unsure of how or why the words came out when he’d done everything, _everything_ in his power to hide it, and he’d done it _flawlessly_ —but Steve’s present self holds firm.

“Whatever you want me to be sayin’, Buck.”

Bucky sucks a stilted breath in through his teeth.

“Steve, you don’t,” he shakes his head; “you’re not like that, stop it.”

“Like what?”

“You _know_ —”

“Then I know,” Steve cuts him off, makes every bone in him, every ounce of his stare and lift of his chest, every breath in his lungs resolute. “And so do you,” and it’s mostly that resolution that fuels him, but Steve can’t lie and say he doesn’t need to soothe some question in his heart when he asks:

“Don’t you?”

“Steve,” Bucky breathes in; “you don’t understand—”

“S’yours,” Steve says it, soft but still ironclad: because it’s true, it’s _true_ —Steve wonders sometimes if the day they met, something bigger than himself gave his heart to James Buchanan Barnes for safekeeping always, because it knew better than Steve ever could and it knew sooner than Steve could grasp. “Tell me that you know it’s yours, because _that’s_ what I understand.”

And Bucky, he just looks at Steve, looks and looks until Steve thinks he’s got it wrong, until Steve feels more of who he was take over who he is and fear starts to freeze his blood colder and colder as his heart starts to pound and who Steve _is_ tries to remember that come hell or high water, this is what he was sent back to do, to make sure Bucky knew, whether he wanted it, whether he wanted to know it or not, whether he felt the same and returned it in kind, it didn’t matter, it doesn’t matter—

It’s in the space of a single beat of his racing heart and Bucky’s hand cups his face and draws him in, palm rough against the open skin of the wound on Steve’s cheek but for however much that hurts it doesn’t matter, because Bucky’s mouth is on his and Steve can feel him breathe and oh.

 _Oh_ , but that’s the most perfect of things, and even a Steve Rogers with unprecedented lung capacity still can’t fucking _breathe_ for how it feels; a Steve Rogers with a downright metronomic heart fells it skip and flutter not like it used to but almost beautifully, almost heaven-sent—it is by far the most important feeling he’s ever known, earth-shattering and soul-searing, raw and unvarnished and honest and pure and Steve stays with it, as long as he can before he fades, because _this_ has to be what closes the loop, and sets him free, then. The _certainty_ that Bucky feels the same, spelled out clear in the motion of his lips.


	4. 1941

To be fair, it’s an easy mistake for Steve to make.

Though admittedly, much as he’d known, objectively, that he’d been on death’s door more than his share as a young man, he hadn’t realized until now, being _actually_ at that threshold within the tender-terrifying hold of the quantum vortex, that waking up from that dance with the Reaper was so damn _close_ to the end, in truth. Because when he blinks, it takes him a while to figure it out.

He’s not done. This isn’t the end. He’s not dead, even though he damn well felt it, or else, what he’d always assumed it would feel like. Whatever he’s been spared or cursed to get right, he'd failed again.

He’s in bed, and his body fucking _hurts_ , and the heat behind him, beneath him, around him is less his own and more from the hands that are stroking over his chest in careful, rhythmic time, matched to the rise-and-fall that’s lifting him from below—he’s pressed against a chest, a familiar one, and held close enough that his own lungs are being coaxed from both sides, hands at the front and another pair of lungs at the back to just move; first just to move and then maybe, _maybe_ to _breathe_.

Bucky’s holding him, and the cold draft he’s trying to hold out of Steve’s body is unmistakable: they’re in Brooklyn, in their apartment, and Steve Rogers has fallen short yet again in making sure the truth of his heart is known enough to count.

God _damnit_.

He’ll try harder, then. He’ll lay it all out and he’ll do it as many times as he has to, he vows then and there, because if Steve’s lost his chance to have Bucky in his arms to keep, a Bucky who knows he’s loved beyond the laws of physics and reason and possibility itself, then he’ll be _damned_ if any other version of himself misses that chance, but more, so much more—

He’ll be damned if any other version of _Bucky_ lives or dies without knowing he was the most important, most precious, most sacred thing in Steve Rogers’ world.

He must move, his resolve must stiffen his younger body’s limbs or shift his frame in Bucky’s hold, because Bucky shifts in kind and hisses, the sound itself on a knife’s edge like it’s sacred to try, to hope, to dare in case there’s no response, or nothing left to offer one at all:

“Steve?”

He remembers waking in Bucky’s hold before and knowing he was going to be okay, remembers how Bucky used to keep him warm and pace his breath to teach Steve’s to follow, and he remembers Bucky held him close to his heartbeat to try and convince Steve’s to keep at it, but Steve doesn’t remember—maybe because in comparison it was never obvious, where it’s so very obvious now—Bucky’s heartbeat pounding in the effort, steady but so very fast and taut like he’s running from the worst thing imaginable, the worst possible thing…

Now it’s Steve who doesn’t know whether to hope, but he gives everything he is to his ailing body in Bucky’s arms, uses every supersoldier ounce of his being to heave a breath, in perfect concert with Bucky’s. It’s hard, it’s so fucking _hard_ and Steve’s stunned in an instant by how bad off he must have really been, how much luckier he was than he thought that he’d ever made it through, ever survived long enough to see himself reborn, to save Bucky and lose him, and lose him, and lose him—

“Oh, thank _fuck_ ,” Bucky exhales like the universe had been sitting on his chest and the weight dissipates in an instant, and for all the guilt that Steve’s always felt for taking so much of Bucky’s energy, Bucky’s time, Bucky’s attention and _life_ , there’s a glaze over it all that Steve’s no longer able, or willing, to deny: there’s something addictive, something made of pride and want and joy in having _Bucky_ willing to do all that, just for him. 

“Steve,” he breathes, and that racing heart skips as Bucky’s hands hold him closer, and Steve lets himself think: maybe; _yes_.

“Buck?” Steve asks, and he’s surprised—though he shouldn’t be‚ at how weak, how slurred and faint his own voice sounds.

“You’re alright,” Bucky says immediately, like a script he knows too well, and likely enough, that’s exactly what it is. “You’re here, you’re alright, you’re...”

And Bucky goes quiet, and his heart’s still racing, and Steve frowns and works against the force of sickness and gravity in concert to lift a hand and cover Bucky’s own against his chest.

“Bucky, what…”

“Thought I lost you, punk,” Bucky whispers, and bows his head so that his face is in Steve’s limp hair. “Thought I lost you for a second, there.”

“Can’t lose me,” Steve says, and trades strength for sound as the words come out in barely a whisper and Bucky shakes his head, because to Bucky those words aren’t true, where to Steve, they’re proven fact. Bucky can’t lose Steve, ever, though the opposite never failed to prove its own certainty.

“I mean it,” Steve says, and his own heart starts pounding too, can’t afford it but can’t avoid it, like all the fire in his present self is siphoning into his former body in the beat of his pulse, and Bucky's hand atop it starts moving up and down, stroking out a calmer, safer rhythm but Steve was never safe.

“Love you, always,” Steve says, and turns his head as best he can where he's propped against Bucky, and the motion ends up with his ear right over Bucky’s heart: fitting, and so Steve hears the skip in that steady thrumming, the tripping it takes up at those words. 

“Always be with you,” Steve presses closer to Bucky’s body; swears that one thing he wants more than anything in the world. “Always come back for you,” and he will, because he knows what happens when he fails, when he doesn’t: “Promise.”

“Steve,” Bucky’s voice is strained, pulse still starting and stopping without any sense, grasping for purchase as Bucky grasps for explanation, for a reason to Steve’s words beyond the sheer honesty that it _is_ : “your fever—”

“Broke,” Steve croaks out, and Bucky should know it too from the sweat-soaked shirt plastered to Steve’s skin, clear to Bucky’s touch everywhere it lands on Steve’s weak body, against Steve’s strengthening soul.

“It’s all me,” Steve breathes out, and splays his long fingers out as far as they’ll reach around Bucky’s hand that he still holds against his own chest, tries to encompass it and prove something that’s overwhelming, all consuming, maybe eternal, given everything its survived beyond survival. “It’s all true.”

Steve feels Bucky swallow, and fells the impossible uptick to the drumming in his chest just the same Steve doesn’t think before he presses his lips to the torrent there, holds for ten beats too fast, too little time to hold his own heart, to prove his own feelings straight to the source.

“I’m tired of keepin’ it back,” Steve whispers there; “holdin’ it back when all I’ve ever wanted was to tell you,” and it _hurts_ to try and turn, his body drained; it hurts to let go of Bucky’s hand, to sacrifice the feeling of his heartbeat at Steve’s ear, but Steve has to look at him. He _has_ to. 

“And if you don’t,” Steve gasps, the effort of moving too much for even the strength of his body in the now to counter; “if, if—”

“Shut up.”

Steve blinks, and tries to parse the response, whether it’s said with venom—it’s not—or whether it’s too hard—and no.

It’s soft, and it’s firm, but it has so much give to it, it has so much heart in it, and Steve can feel that heart against his chest now where he’s splayed there, boneless for the exhaustion that takes hold: he can feel it, and it flutters with force, but it’s different. It’s lighter, somehow.

“Goddamnit,” Bucky says, and Steve realizes Bucky’s face is still buried in his hair, his lips dragging against his scalp like he needs to be curled around Steve’s whole body to know any of this is true, any of this is more than a waking dream—from Steve still breathing to Steve saying...that. 

“Just, just shut up,” and it almost sounds like he’s talking only half to Steve, and half to something bigger, ephemeral, like the words pain him or awe him or both and he’s wrestling with what he says next as his eyes screw shut, and Steve’s chest hurts for the raucous heart inside until Bucky's eyes snap back open and lock onto Steve’s and his lips move but it takes Steve a moment between them shaping words and him hearing them.

It’s worth the delay, though.

“I love you back.”

And Steve soars, Steve is the strongest man alive, and he strains his neck until he’s dizzy, but Bucky reads it before Steve even does and he cradles the back of Steve’s neck to keep it steady and they meet in the middle, a force of nature between them and between all the lives he’s led, with Bucky’s tongue tracing the line of mouth and coaxing open his lips, Steve’s never felt so goddamn alive.

“What do we do now?” Steve asks, because he’s made it through the wilderness, through the worst, and Bucky’s heart beneath his own is steady, steady, steady and his hands on Steve’s body don’t seem in any hurry to ever let go.

“We get you better,” Bucky says simply; “and I get to hold you the way I want to, not just the way I have to,” and those words are full of so much as he hooks arms around Steve, careful but strong, and it is different from every other time; Bucky’s heat against him not a necessity of the body, but of the soul.

“And we go from there.”

And Steve thinks that’s the best idea he’s ever heard.


	5. June, 1943

Steve knows exactly where he is when he feels himself coalesce into a shared existence with his former self. To forget anything about this night would be impossible; to remember it as a missed chance was inevitable.

He doesn’t hesitate, this time.

“Come with me.”

He grabs Bucky’s hand as soon as the girls have wandered off to look at some display or get a soda, whatever it is they were doing when Bucky broke away and it was just the two of them in the corner by the recruitment area, which is thankfully rife with small passageways and alley-like walkthroughs that dead-end far enough to avoid notice, but quick enough to avoid use. Steve doesn’t think beyond just doing, just taking this chance with both hands and _trying_ his damnedest, because saying the words, and hearing them back; tasting Bucky’s mouth and feeling his skin: none of it’s worked, or been enough, and the anxiety of it all is mounting to the point where it threatens the joy of being _able_ to feel Bucky, to have him there and momentarily _his_ , or close enough—not least because Steve’s carrying the threat of what’s to come too soon if he doesn’t make this work, if he doesn’t satisfy whatever it is that the universe wants, or that death demands.

So he goes all in, all at once; braces himself and holds himself tall.

“Buck, I,” he starts, and it’s harder than he imagined, even having done it already. He goes with what he knows best, and that’s the god’s-honest truth.

“I didn’t want to say it, and ruin anything, ruin _everything_ , but,” he shakes his head, and looks to the tent next to them, giving them cover; “but now,” and Bucky knows as well as Steve does that the war changes everything, for everyone, but _Steve_ knows what it will change for them and he has to believe he’s here, that he's been brought back to this moment, because letting Bucky know that he loves him will make a difference, will save him, body and soul, from what’s the come.

“I’m coming back, punk,” Bucky responds dryly, trying to downplay the earnestness, the attempt to make a sure truth out of a hopeful lie they’ve both been living inside between them, unwilling to face anything less. “So none of this last chance bullshit talk, you hear me?” he shoves Steve’s shoulder affectionately, but his grin doesn’t meet his eyes.

Steve’s heart clenches.

“I know,” Steve says, as surely as he’s able. “I know you’re coming back because if you…” 

Steve tries to find stronger words, bigger words to encompass what Bucky is, what Bucky means, and more than that, what it’ll mean to lose him, what it’ll do to Steve if he no longer exists: he’s known that life that’s no life at all, and even then he’s never found the words.

“I’ll,” he swallows, and his breath catches in the attempt to spit it out: “I don’t know how I’ll—”

He can’t, though. He can’t say it, lest he make a reality out of something he cannot survive.

“You’re coming back,” Steve finally says, with all the conviction in his body, his bones. “But I’ve gotta say it, before then,” he steels himself and meets Bucky’s eyes and doesn’t look away, doesn’t blink. “Can’t let you leave without it.”

And Bucky’s gaze narrows, not suspiciously but like he’s trying to pinpoint where Steve’s headed, what thing Steve’s held back from Bucky of all people that merits this much tension in Steve’s limbs.

“What is it, Steve?” 

“I,” Steve breathes in deep; “I can’t...”

And finally he realizes that’s the thing, that’s it exactly: he can’t, because there are no words, and Bucky’s in his uniform and Steve’s going to be a soldier and meet him on the other side of an ocean and none of that is as big as the thing in Steve’s heart, wrapped around his soul across time and realities and dimensions and potentialities, across every impossible bend in the known universe to the point of nearly breaking: nothing they face is as big as this thing between them, not for _them_.

So Steve does the only thing he can do, and fists the front of Bucky’s uniform in his hands and kisses him hard and sloppy, all of the strength of his body and will and feeling in it, and Bucky doesn’t respond, lips taking but not giving, but they do _take_ and Steve’s always wanted to give this, to _gift_ this and Bucky’s not pushing him away, and Bucky opens his mouth to let in Steve’s tongue when Steve presses forward and Steve outlines the shape of his lips, the flats of his teeth with single minded fervor, and Bucky lets him. Steve kisses him with all he is until he has to come up for air, and they’re both panting when he does, Bucky looking wide-eyed and maybe a little dazed, if Steve’s being optimistic; stunned, if Steve’s being a realist. 

“What,” Bucky voice is low, and filled with cracks; “was that?”

Steve huffs, and feels himself flush as he shrugs.

“Think it speaks for itself.”

Bucky’s quiet, and Steve’s heartbeat’s the only thing he can hear in the interim until Bucky looks up, and Steve can see through his whole frame that he’s goddamn _shaking_ , can hear it clear in his voice when he asks:

“Did you mean it?”

Steve hopes he’s clear as to the answer when he poses a question back, the only self-preservation he can claim to his name:

“Did you _want_ me to?”

And Steve isn’t prepared for it, but he welcomes it gratefully, like a gift from from heavens and a mercy from hell, all things from all places in all magnitudes at once when Bucky surges forward and meets Steve this time, takes when Steve gives and gives when Steve takes and presses into his mouth before he presses against his body, like he needs to feel everything, everywhere and Steve starts to get hard enough to feel Bucky’s length stiff in kind and he shivers, and Bucky’s mouth traces Steve’s lips to the corners, his jaw on either side, and sucks at his pulse point ravenously, like Steve is the center of the universe somehow when it’s the other way around, Bucky’s always been Steve’s gravitational pull: but Bucky downright worships him with his mouth for however many moments they’re able to wring from the world, hidden away and on the brink of some end they can’t avoid.

“I’m coming back, Steve,” Bucky finally speaks against Steve’s lips, chest heaving so it knocks a trembling rhythm against Steve’s doing the same. “I’m coming back to you.”

“Not if I come find you first,” Steve vows, because he will. He _will_.

“Then I’ll be waiting,” Bucky answers, doesn’t ask for anything more than Steve’s lips again as he kisses him hard and fast, one more time. “Open arms, I’ll be waiting.”

“You’d better,” Steve breathes, and holds him close; “you’d fucking better.”

And it’s true. He’d fucking better.

And this time, _this time_ , it’d better hold.


	6. November, 1943

The first time, Steve knew something wasn’t okay; not just the aftermath, the trauma of it above and beyond the foxholes that even the battlefield itself could dull or make somehow more manageable, more possible to process and cope. Steve knew, but he didn’t know how to say it, how to dig deeper, and he’d been preoccupied—and that preoccupation had haunted his nightmares for years since. Had he paid more attention to the way Bucky picked off the enemy with his rifle with even greater precision than before; if he’d given more thought to how Bucky said nothing when he drank, when normally it loosened his lips, as if the drink itself wasn’t doing its job at all; if he’d been less caught up in the novelty, the buzzing in his head and his limbs at the attention of people, of women; a woman, a beautiful, brilliant woman that looked at Steve and saw—

The first time, Steve had noticed. And he should have done more, should have pushed, should have asked. If he had, maybe he’d have put the pieces together. If he had, maybe he…

This time, he notices. And he _acts_.

Bucky’s not best pleased with him, by any stretch, when he demands they share a tent indefinitely. There’s a whole spectrum of reactions to that, from trying to laugh it off ( _don’t need you mothering me, Stevie_ , but Steve hadn’t ever processed before how hollow that laugh, how tight that smile had grown), to something only _just_ flirting with downright rage ( _goddamnit, Steve, I don’t need to be fucking coddled, do you not trust me, is that it? Have I not saved your ass enough times out here for you to know I’ll keep doing it, that I’m good, that—_ ); there’s a whole vivid _spectrum_ of reactions, is the point, but Steve stands firm on it, and only turns close enough to whisper goodnight when they’re both in at the same time, not on watch: every night he can, so he can keep an eye on Bucky, sure, but also to be there when Bucky needs him, when the floodgates open in case they were waiting the first time, and Steve just wasn’t there to hold back the deluge until they were safe.

It’s not the night he expects it, with Bucky faced away from him as far as he can get from Steve’s heat—angry, that’s how he sleeps when he’s angry about being near Steve, and Steve’s had to get used to that, had to try his damnedest to make it about anything but himself but it’s hard. It hurts.

He _loves_.

So he’s not expecting it on this night of all nights, with Bucky so near and still so far, and like that because he _wants_ to be

“Steve?”

Steve’s breath catches, and he turns slowly, in case it was just his imagination, or maybe Bucky’s asleep and talking through his dreams.

(It’s not his imagination; his hearing is impeccable now; and Bucky’s not asleep, because his breathing’s too fucking fast.)

But Steve still turns slow, not to scare him, not to make it seem like he has to follow through, not to give any pressure to what may or may not come after Steve’s _name_.

“I’m,” Bucky says, stutteringly, taking a shaky breath in: “I’m not _right_.”

The words sound like a sob, though Bucky’s expression is stoic in the dim moonlight through the tent flaps.

“They did,” Bucky swallows audibly, and Steve keeps himself so still. “They did something and I’m not okay.”

Bucky breathes heavily, through something invisible, against something unseen, and all Steve wants to do is reach out and _touch_ but he can’t, he has to let Bucky lead, at least a little further, so he slides closer to Bucky, just by inches, and when Bucky’s breathing calms by even a hair, and he says nothing more, just lets the confession of it echo between them, Steve can’t stay quiet and keep his heart to himself all at once, not anymore, so he just whispers:

“Buck.” 

“I couldn’t tell the medics,” Bucky begins again immediately, like his name is a latch that unlocks more of what he’d been holding in. “I don’t know how I’d say it, because I don’t know what, I don’t know the right words, I...”

He trails off, breathing hard again and without prelude he rolls over and turns to Steve, and they’re incredibly close, and Bucky’s eyes are so wide, petrified, and they dart everywhere as his chest heaves and oh, Steve aches just to look at him in such a state. He can hardly stand it.

“Bucky, look at me,” Steve says, throwing intention out the window and moving solely on instinct and the empathetic pounding of his blood. “Shh, come on, look at me,” and he reaches out, grasping Bucky’s shoulders first and then sliding just a little up to the sides of his neck, and he gentles his hands there with precision because he can’t overstep, he can’t fuck this up, he has to let Bucky know he’s not alone, never alone, never again.

“You’re okay,” Steve breathes out, but Bucky just shakes his head.

“I’m not,” and Steve swallows hard, because yes, he’s probably the liar here, much as he wishes otherwise. So he digs deep and finds the truth at its core and tries again.

“You’re safe, and we’re gonna make sure you’re okay, yeah?” Because Steve will die this time before Bucky’s anything but safe. Steve will tear out his own heart and sell his own soul before he lets Bucky falter. “I’m not gonna let you be anything but okay.”

Bucky's quiet for a long stretch of seconds that feel heavier, lengthier than they really are, Steve knows that, but it feels a little like drowning, somehow warmer than Steve remembers the sensation, and worth more than bombs condemned to ice, worth more than lives saved, at least in that moment, because the one life in front of Steve that needs saving matters more.

“You’ve got,” he shakes his head, a puts on an expression too twisted and heartbreaking to be called a smile at all. “You’ve got bigger things than—”

“Buck,” Steve says, the need for him to _understand_ seeping through, relentless; “there’s nothing more important than you.”

“Steve,” Bucky starts, and it’s a tone that’s familiar, it’s a tone that followed him in alleys and from enlistment offices and trailed along after every 4F in every city; at least some things didn’t change, but what kind of world are they living in that _this_ is the joy Steve gleans from what they are, where they are, what this is—

It’s harder, now, to tell himself in the now from himself back then, when his body is the same even if not much else in him is; it’s harder still, because these days are where the biggest of his regrets stem from, hold root: but Steve knows what kind of world they were living in. He knows what it means that this is the joy, because it’s the same joy Steve’s always known, really, and only learned to treasure properly too late: the joy is Bucky. Just Bucky.

“Steve, this isn’t Brooklyn, this is—”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

Bucky closes his mouth and studies him, and there’s something in his gaze that’s more like what Steve found in him almost a century from now, rather than something from before and Bucky’s right.

This isn’t Brooklyn.

“I didn’t mount a one-man mission into that hellhole for my health, or outta the goodness of my heart,” Steve says, slow but steady and sure, purposefully so, because he knows he won’t be able to help but faltering around what comes next, the burn of tears already hot at the backs of his eyes.

“Bucky, they were sending your condolence letter. Back to you parents, your sisters,” and that’s when the burn turns to fire, and he can’t hold back the break in his voice, or the single tear that won’t listen from falling to his lashes and blinking down his cheek. That’s when his body starts to tremble and his voice starts to shake in kind and he knows his heart’s laid bare in it, and he doesn’t care at all because it’s time.

It’s always been time.

“Moment I heard your name, my fuckin’ heart stopped. It was like the whole world ended, and I couldn’t hear a word past your name,” Steve chokes out; “your name was my world and they were saying it was dust,” he looks up at Bucky, whose eyes have gone wide again but this time it’s a shock aimed solely at Steve, and for as many times as he’s been through this, one missed chance to change the cosmos after another, Steve doesn’t understand how it can be such a surprise when Steve says the only real truths he’s ever known. He was a good liar, but he never believed he was _that_ good.

“You’re my world, and they were saying you were gone,” Steve says brokenly, eyes on the thin blankets bunched between them, and he sees Bucky’s wrist enter his vision like he means to reach out, means to touch Steve’s hand and hold him steady but they don’t do that, not now, not here; this _isn’t Brooklyn_ —

“Steve?” Bucky’s hand wavers as much as his voice, now, and Steve can’t hold it in any longer.

“You’re my _world_ ,” he says, and even he can hear the way it sounds, exactly as it should: you’re my world, and you’re my heart, and you’re the reason I get up and the reason I fight and if a soul exists, mine’s tied to yours and I’d never want it any other way because I love you and I will love you until the end of the universe, until nothing exists but this, but us.

Steve can hear it, and he watches as Bucky hears it, struggles around it, tries to understand it until he looks up and meets Steve’s eyes and the questions in them are endless but Steve holds his gaze and answers the only one that matters as best he can.

 _Yes_.

And of all the times, all the chances Steve’s revisited to try and take, this is the first where they kiss silent and slow, like they have all the time in the world in the place where that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Steve’s hands grip Bucky’s forearms—he’s so thin, still, after his rescue but the muscle definition there is otherworldly, and Steve should have _seen_ , before—and cups his face, his pulse under Steve’s fingertips at the temple—powerful, like a human heart alone couldn’t hold—and Steve has failed so many times, and Steve knows the tears are falling from his eyes but the taste between them is saltier than his own tears alone and they’re shaking and they’re holding to each other like it’s the end of the world and Steve knows, somehow, that this won’t be the last time he gives Bucky his heart to change the future, but it’s the first time he doesn’t think he wants to bother trying to make it stop.

He needs too badly, even if he can only hold to Bucky for a time.

He loves too deeply, to want there to ever be an end; if this is death, he’ll trade it for rest. He’ll fucking trade it.

He’s too goddamn selfish to want to give it up.


	7. January, 1945

They’re behind a tree, sharing a smoke; it doesn’t do anything for either of them, Steve realizes now, even though back then he’d stood with Bucky and done it because he’d fooled himself into believing it was calming Bucky’s nerves, which was good, and he wanted to be close to Bucky, which was only natural, only the most normal thing left in this hellhole. 

Steve’s made his peace with this happening, again and again, almost gratefully to be honest: but what he isn’t steady inside is not knowing the end of the story, not knowing if loving really did conquer all like it did in tales and daydreams, or hell: if it even just turned this to the side a little, one way or the other, so that the ending was different. Steve’s unsettled by the questions, by the lack of any real proof, or even a whisper, that what he’s doing matters on some grander scale.

Then again: if loving Bucky made things worse, Steve knows it would destroy him, knows beyond a doubt that somehow, some way, he would disintegrate to dust as he’s seen happen with his own eyes, but this time because he himself would be less than that, and dust would have been a mercy.

Steve’s always had a flair for the dramatic, or so he’s been told, but that’s the god’s honest truth if he ever knew it.

So maybe it's best he doesn’t know, and just gets to do what he asked: make Bucky _know_ that he’s loved, beyond reason, no matter what.

But this time. This time is—

They’re going to board a train tomorrow, and this time’s maybe more than Steve can bear.

“Buck?”

Bucky doesn’t look at him, but holds out his cigarette for Steve, who’s let his own burn to ash in his hand. Steve can’t resist the opportunity to taste Bucky on it, even just a little, so he takes it and raises it to his lips and breathes and tries not to lose himself too desperately to the desire to exhale into Bucky’s mouth like he used to watch men do in certain parts of town back home with their hands on each other, men who weren’t afraid to breathe each other in and damn the consequences.

Bucky doesn’t look at him as he lights another for himself, and Steve doesn’t look back either when he speaks:

“If I asked you to stay behind—”

“Not a chance,” Bucky exhales smoke almost elegantly into the air, leaning fully on the bark of the tree. “You go, I go.”

And Steve’s heart sinks, but not too far: it’s not like he didn’t know the answer, not like he wasn’t aware he was walking up against a brick wall. He inhales again and pretends it does anything to ease him; he thought he was better at pretending.

It only does the opposite, setting every sense alight with warning and absolute terror at what’s coming, what’s always been _coming_ —

“What brought this on?” Bucky asks, after the silence spreads out thick enough to cover the sound of their breathing, and it startles Steve, but his heart’s already pounding, so it makes no real difference.

“I’m,” he tries to think of an answer that’s better than the one that comes straight to mind, that encompasses the gravity of what he knows and cannot say, but he can’t. 

“I’m scared.”

At that, Bucky turns to him, and Steve’s almost too quick in turn to face him in kind, needing to see him, and try and take him in while trying to make him see that Steve _needs_ this from him, Steve won’t survive this _again_ —

“Promise me,” Steve starts, _tries_ ; “if anything happens on that train, if you need to play hero, try to save anyone, even me,” he shakes his head and squares his jaw and steels himself to meet Bucky’s oddly impassive stare. 

“Save yourself first,” Steve tries to make it an order, a command, but it doesn’t work; Bucky never took commands from him off duty, anyway, and never hid his eyerolls when Steve tried to be too self-important even then; but Steve also knows that what he’s asking is something entirely beyond Bucky’s own nature, his concept of self. Even if Steve believes his next words like he believes that air can fill his lungs, and love means more than death:

“You matter _more_.”

“Bullshit.”

Bucky drops his cigarette and stomps it into the snow, not that it’s strictly necessary to do so; Steve’s falls from his fingers as Bucky sucks a sharp hiss of air in through clenched teeth.

“Please,” because Steve’s not proud, not here and now; “ _please_ , Buck. I’m beggin’.”

Bucky, of all things, fucking smiles. It’s not made of joy, or humor; if anything it’s wry.

“Steve,” Bucky says, shaking his head; “Steve, I,” and he turns, and takes a step toward Steve, chewing his lip like he’s making a choice, and the choice brings him here.

Right here.

“Here’s what you don’t seem to understand,” Bucky says finally, looking at Steve through his lashes, and his posture seems almost resigned. “And I’d have never said it before, never risked it, because risking it meant risking you but seems like you want to risk yourself now anyway, in bigger ways than we ever imagined,” he looks skyward and laughs without a sound, just the huff of his breath visible in the cold and the parting of his lips. 

“And if you don’t take a swing at me for it, maybe this’ll make you see sense.”

He’s in Steve’s space, breathing Steve’s air, and he doesn’t pause in the motion before he presses his mouth, more a bruise than a kiss, to Steve’s. It’s quick and it’s almost painful and it’s everything Steve wants in the world.

“You were always, are always, and will always be the most important thing,” Bucky says so soft it’s almost inaudible, like if there is something he’s afraid of it’s where these words, above all others, might land. “The _most_ important thing.”

He starts to pull away, expression turning less earnest and more blank but Steve won’t have it, can’t have it and he reaches, grabs for Bucky’s shoulders, slides hands up to cup his jaw, and Bucky’s hands are there to cover his own within the space of a breath.

“I will give my life for yours in a heartbeat, Steve,” Bucky says, a low rumble of a vow; “because my damn-fool heart doesn’t know anything else but to give up everything for you.”

And Steve’s breathless, rootless, unmoored and utterly consumed with everything those words say and mean and everything he wants and needs and he’s the one who pulls Bucky’s face closer, this time; he’s the one who presses bruising lips to Bucky’s mouth. 

“I love you, Buck,” Steve gasps into him; “I won’t make it without you,” his voice strains, his throat tight. “If I lose you, I’ll lose everything, I’ll lose my goddamn _soul_ —”

Bucky kisses back, and they stay there until the morning comes, strong and warm, and _right_ in the cold.

But daylight does come. And Bucky does what Bucky did last time, what Steve thinks that Bucky will always do. Steve tries grasping the metal to hang from further out so that he’ll reach farther but he fails like he did the last time, like Steve thinks he always will.

And Steve’s going to maybe go crazy with not knowing how loving and making it known changes things, or maybe doesn’t, but watching it as far as this magic, this death-wish, this blessing: watching as far as he’s allowed and seeing it fail entirely before his eyes, watching history repeat itself and knowing Bucky loved him, Bucky _loved_ him, and something is different, that is different because Steve knows and this has to be different—

When he lets go, it’s like a reflex. When the spiraling of the vortex takes him, halfway down, he’s grateful, maybe a little but hopeful: he’s changed something. It only takes him, so far as he can understand, when he’s changed something.

But the ground is getting closer, and he closes his eyes, because Steve’s a coward more than he’s not, more than anyone would think: he can’t watch.

It is better that he doesn’t see what happens if love made it _worse_.


	8. 2014

Steve doesn’t realize how long it is, until he surfaces again from the swirling of dimensions and realities, and is standing on that goddamn platform, telling a man whose eyes he doesn’t know except that _of course he knows_ , whose heart has to beat the same as the one he’d give his life for, the one that makes his own worth anything: he forgets how _long_ it takes, to find Bucky again. He forgets that it’s damn near random chance that he does, that he could have been elsewhere, an assignment having taken him across the globe and away from the man he needs most in the universe; he could have been too early, or too late, and he’d thought for so long he was the latter, blamed himself for it relentlessly, but maybe that’s the point. He doesn’t know what happened when he dove after Bucky, when he wasn’t too late, but he has a chance now to not be any later than his first try, his first attempt at clawing toward redemption when it came to saving the man he loves.

He tries something else this, time.

“If I said I loved you,” Steve says simply, before Bucky can rush him, throw him to the ground; “would it mean anything to you?”

Bucky—because this _is_ Bucky, underneath everything it is the man he loves more than love is built to hold.

“Because I did,” Steve says, taking a step forward; cautious, but sure. “I _do_.”

“Love is for children,” Bucky says, but his tone isn’t as steely as it has been; isn’t as full of blind wrath.

“It was that, too,” Steve agrees, though not in the way Bucky meant. “I’ve loved you since,” Steve searches his mind, wonders if he’s ever asked himself that question, his love for Bucky Barnes having been a thing that ran through his veins as far back as he can claim clear memory. 

“God, since forever, seems like.”

Steve tries another step, and Bucky eyes it warily, but doesn’t move.

“But it’s for me now as much as it was then,” Steve proclaims it, declares it; “and all that love is yours.” 

That’s when the soldier steps back, shaking his head and frowning at the floor, at the unforgiving metal of the bridge.

“No,” he says, and the coldness seeps in, but doesn’t take over. Steve may still have a chance.

“Yes,” Steve counters, surer this time. “I never stopped.” And he didn’t, hadn’t; he’s loved and loved made of longing and loss for years and it had made him hollow save for those embers that refused to die and Steve tended them like gems, like the promise of eternity: they were the very thing that killed him slowly, but hell if he’d ever give them up; and now—

“Even when I thought you were, when I had no idea, couldn’t have dreamed…”

He can’t say it, even with incontrovertible truth to the contrary standing in front of him, breathing hard: he can’t say the words that meant, even falsely, that Bucky ceased to exist in this world: the one thing Steve believed in keeping from ever coming to pass, in fighting against to his dying breath.

“I _never_ stopped,”

“I am a weapon,” Bucky hisses, but it seems less violent and more from a certain sort of pain, contrary to the words he speaks: “A weapon does not feel, a weapon is not felt for.”

“Look at me,” Steve says simply; “Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t feel.”

Bucky shakes his head again, back and forth and back and forth and stares somewhere near Steve’s boots.

“You’re starting to, aren’t you?” Steve ventures, because Bucky’s chest is still heaving, fighting against something enormous, like it believes before he can; like his heart knows before his mind and Steve knows that, Steve has always known what that’s like. 

“It’s making you falter, confusing you,” Steve pushes further, and takes back the step Bucky’d taken in the opposite direction. “Don’t be,” Steve tries to soften the blow of what it must feel like, even if he can’t possibly imagine. “Love can be confusing, but it’s the most human thing in the world.”

The head-shaking pauses, and Bucky’s eyes narrow, even if Steve can’t quite see his eyes themselves; 

“You’re not a weapon,” Steve tells him, tries to reason beyond all the programming, all the brainwashing, all the lies; tries to love through the unthinkable. “You’re a person, you’re the man who holds my whole heart and I never thought I’d see it, see _you_ again—”

“ _No_!” Bucky lashes out, and dives toward Steve, fists raised, but Steve catches them before they make contact; he won’t be able to hold long, but he can hold long enough to say one more thing. Maybe the most important thing, the one bit he got right the first time around.

“Bucky,” he whispers, and they’re so goddamned _close_ , Steve can feel his heat, the panting of his breath.

“Do it if you need to,” Steve’s eyes flicker down to the knife at Bucky’s thigh. “I won’t stop you.”

Bucky meets his eyes then, fire in them first and foremost, but uncomprehending, like he cannot imagine what this means.

Steve’s heart breaks a little more, for that.

“But I love you,” Steve tells him, with as much force and fullness as his heart can manage to lend his words: “and I’m with you ‘til the end of the line.”

And those words, they shake him the same way they did before; his hands fall from Steve’s grasp and he falters, staggers.

“I,” he stares at Steve, eyes wide. “I don’t...”

“What?” Steve asks, following his retreat step for step. “You don’t what?”

“I, I...” Bucky gasps for air like it’s disappearing. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s okay,” Steve assures him; "I’ll help you,” and he swallows hard; “I’ll do anything.”

Bucky stops, and Steve keeps advancing before he notices, and suddenly they're close enough to touch.

And suddenly, that’s exactly what Bucky does, palm out to press against Steve’s chest, almost curious, almost desperate to feel it rise and fall for the way he just holds there, and stares at it like it means so much more than it possibly can.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Bucky says hoarsely, and Steve reaches to cover Bucky’s hand, tests whether it will lace with his own and follow it to Steve cheek, to lean into and draw comfort. It does, beyond all sense, and Steve’s breath stutters, and his eyes close, and he just lets himself _feel_

“I know why I did,” Steve breathes, and Bucky doesn’t pull away. His fingers twitch against Steve’s face, but he doesn’t pull away.

“Let me help you,” Steve whispers, turning to speak it against his palm. “Let’s get out of here, both of us,” he breathes, and if the motion of his lips against Bucky’s hand resembles a kiss he’s not sorry; “and let me _help_ you.”

Steve fades from this timeline, this chance to make amends before the helicarrier crumbles, but it doesn’t matter. Bucky’s hand’s in his, and that’s more than enough to know.


	9. 2016, Part I

“Bucky.”

If Steve had bothered to pay attention, to trust _himself_ the first time, he wouldn’t have had to ask so many questions, or waste so much time the first go-around. He could have just looked in Bucky’s eyes and seen all the answers, because Bucky’s not hiding from him anymore. Bucky’s here, and he knows he’s been found, and there’s something in him, Steve can see it, that’s ready for it, whether he likes it or not.

So Steve doesn’t bother asking if Bucky knows him, or if Bucky remembers, or why Bucky’s lying. He just says what’s necessary to save the man he loves the most pain he can. He doesn’t know if they’ll make it out, or if it’ll end the way it did last time, but he can be there, he can stand beside him from here on out and never falter: he can _be_ there.

And Steve has to believe that goddamn _counts_ for something.

“They’re coming.”

Bucky’s lips curl dangerously. Steve’s never seen that look directed at him before.

His eyes, though. His eyes betray that sneer and that’s enough. 

“And you’re the first?”

“No,” Steve tells him simply, carefully keeping his calm and hoping Bucky can’t see the way his breath runs tight, and his pulse the same under his uniform. “I’m what’s going to get you out before they storm that door.”

Bucky’s eyes narrow, ever so slightly.

“You know why they want me,” Bucky says, doesn’t ask.

“I know you didn’t do it.”

Bucky’s eyes blaze, and speak of just how _stupid_ he thinks Steve is being, and that.

That’s like a balm on Steve’s soul, to see _that_ , maybe the most familiar thing left to him in all the world.

“How the _hell_ can you know that?’

“Because I know you.” 

“You _knew_ me,” Bucky snarls; “you don't know what they made me. You don’t know what I’ve become.” 

There’s both shame and challenge in the words, and Steve’s not sure which he wants to meet first: easing what parts of that shame he can and bearing it alongside him where he can’t; or meeting that challenge and exceeding expectations and being what Bucky needs, whatever he needs. Steve doesn’t know which comes first.

“Maybe not everything,” Steve admits, but it’s no concession; he wants to know, everything; everything Bucky wants or needs to tell him but it won’t matter, in the grander scheme, because it changes nothing, it will change nothing but perhaps ease something in Bucky’s chest in saying it when the time comes but then it’s only for the better—no risk to it, or lie in it, or revelation withheld to lesser ends.

“Maybe not everything, but more than enough.”

“Enough to what?” Bucky demands, and Steve knows they both hear chopper blades in the distance, clamour in the streets. They don’t have much time. Steve’s heart pounds, but that’s not why.

“To love you as much as I ever did,” he comes out with it, plain and clear as everything he’s said thus far because there’s nothing else to do with it; there’s nothing more to give with it: the world’s complicated enough, closing in enough to crush them and this was never a part of that. This was never a threat, Steve’s come to realize it and hold dear in his chest: this was never a risk. This was freedom. 

“Frankly,” Steve adds, because he’s free to do it; “I never needed to know anything except that you were still breathing in this world for that to be true.”

Bucky looks at him like he’s not real, like he’s a figment or a lie. He still speaks to him, though. “You’ve got a deathwish.”

“That’s a tired line, even now.”

Bucky’s eyes narrow sharply. “You’re reckless.”

“And?”

Bucky steps forward, slow, but it’s _forward_ rather than backward, as the doors to the building burst open floors below.

“You’re the reason I knew I was human,” he finally says amidst the steady rush of boots up the stairs. “Because if I could feel for you as much as I did, as much as I—” he shakes his head, hair obscuring the pain in his face as he screws up his expression against what seems to be _too much_ of that endless, ever-present feeling. 

“If I could feel all this for you,” Bucky grinds out from low in his throat, or deep in his soul; “what else could I be?”

He looks at Steve, then, something broken open in his eyes and breaking further for whatever love he finds in Steve’s gaze—all of it. All the love and affection and belief and gratefulness and, and—

“I think about you all the time,” Bucky whispers; “sometimes just to remember that fact, that I’m not a machine, or just a weapon, but sometimes it’s, it’s…”

“They’ll be here soon,” Steve picks up, and leans in, and they’re almost touching; “Let me get you _out_.”

Bucky swallows hard and shakes his head again, this time hard; hateful for it.

“There’s not enough time,” he croaks out, like he regrets it but expected nothing less.

“We can fight them off,” Steve counters, because he knows; he knows because no other option exists in this world and he will not lose Bucky again. He won’t. 

“And then we can run.”

Bucky’s still shaking his head. “We’ll always be running.”

And Steve smiles, then, and it’s a real smile because it’s a fucking cliche but it’s true, it’s so _true_.

“If I’m running with you, it’s not running,” he tells Bucky with every ounce of conviction and every beat of his heart he can give in just those words: “It’s living, Buck. It’s finally living.”

Bucky looks at him again like he’s not entirely real, but there’s something else dawning in his eyes, too, and the footsteps have stopped behind the door: this is it.

Bucky weighs him in his gaze and Steve knows the gravity of all that he’s debating, all that he’s trying to find and gauge and Steve prays to a god he doesn’t think he can believe in anymore, for all that he's seen; prays to the power that keeps him here and keeps him trying, everywhere, every time, with Bucky, for Bucky: let him be enough.

“Brace yourself,” Bucky finally says, without the stance of his body or the set of his expression changing one bit. “I might have to use you as a distraction.”

And something breaks in Steve that was holding him in, holding him back, and he feels the rush of joy in him at the tacit agreement to hold together, to be together, to run together made known.

“Sounds like fun,” Steve quips, and he cannot fight his grin, and Bucky huffs almost a laugh, which makes him grin wider as Bucky rolls his eyes and turns to the door, ready for the fight.

“Stupid fucking punk,” he growls, and it shoots through Steve’s body like brushfire.

The hinges break open.


	10. 2016, Part II

“Buck?”

Steve’s voice is small; they’re not meant to be seen, or noticed, but that’s not the only reason. He doesn’t want to be here again. Not as fiercely as some of the other memories he’s been thrown into by whatever mysterious force controls this, but it’s up there. This and everything that follows: if Steve had to trace a line from when things went from bad to worse, with a few exceptions in the middle: this was where it started. This was the beginning of the end.

And Steve was hoping, foolishly maybe, that doing this, whatever it is and however it works, would someone change that end.

He closes his eyes and breathes: as it happens, if he’s going to get words past this throat, if he’s going to force his limbs forward to see anything through, he’s going to have to keep believing, keep hoping.

Steve always was a little bit of a fool. 

“I didn’t tell it right.”

Bucky stops in his advance, turns to Steve with the question clear in his eyes.

“I didn’t,” Steve fumbles around for a bit; “I didn’t tell the real reason, I didn’t tell the whole truth.”

“About what?” Bucky tone is careful, despite their dire circumstances; ostensibly, they don’t have time now for Steve’s confessions, his declarations, his trying to change the course of their history—they don’t have _time_ and they both know it but Bucky’s watching him with a single-minded focus and a generosity of patience that Steve probably doesn’t deserve but is grateful as all hell for, because he has to say this. He _has_ to, before it’s too late.

“I was jealous.”

Bucky laughs, a little cold with it. Maybe that was why Steve had chosen the story in the first place, aside from the way he’d revelled in the closeness of their bodies, out of necessity, in one of the few instances where Steve was wholly aware, rather than riddled with fever, huddled for warmth. Maybe he told the story because that ice truck was so goddamn frigid, just like goddamn Siberia. 

Maybe.

“Of _me_?” he scoffs; not cruelly, never that, but almost as if, should Steve have been jealous at any point in their friendship over a woman, this was a strange instance to bring up; and moreover, to bring up _now_ : “Dot was nice, Steve, but—”

“Of _her_.”

And he remembers it in his bones as one of many instances where Steve imagined himself closer to being the woman on Bucky’s arm than to being Bucky, with his arm outstretched for a dame to take. Steve was jealous, yes. So fucking jealous.

He has no choice but to leave the words to linger like a pall over them as Bucky’s expression shifts as slow as the ice around them, from bewilderment to something sharper, something unnameable and like lead in Steve’s stomach but he forges on, when Bucky is silent, because he has no other choice.

“And I didn’t tell the right story anyway, the one I wanted to.”

Bucky had already started to turn, a quarter spin away from Steve but he freezes in motion, and Steve is more than ready to take the pause as an invitation.

“I wanted to ask if you remembered sitting on the roof, watching the fireworks on my birthday,” Steve says in a rush, and Bucky snorts to himself just a little.

“Gonna have to be more specific than that, pal,” he says, a little sardonic. “We did that every year.”

Steve takes a deep, steadying breath and charges on:

“I wanted to ask if you ever realized I wanted to kiss you under them, every year.”

And if Steve thought Bucky’d frozen in his footsteps before, he was wrong, because what happens to his entire body, how it goes tense first and then positively rigid: that’s frozen.

And it’s all Steve can do just to wait, just to wait until Bucky speaks but they’re out of time, they’re running out of _time_ , and Steve’s a little bit foolish.

“I know everything you’ve done,” he ventures, reading Bucky’s posture as best he can and guessing at the recurring theme of Bucky’s certainty that he’s not worthy, that he’s irredeemable when if he is, than Steve is worse than dead, because Bucky is his everything.

“I’ve read everything—”

“You learned Russian, then?” Bucky scoffs, but Steve doesn’t let it throw him off.

“Of course I fucking learned Russian,” he shoots back; “though most of it was in German.”

“Your German was always shit,” Bucky responds, and he’s not wrong; at least, not about back then.

“I had a pretty damn good reason to sharpen it up this time,” Steve says simply. “But I’ve seen all there is to see of it, Buck, everywhere there was to look and everyone there was to ask and that changes nothing. It changes absolutely nothing because it wasn’t your fault, even your _hands_ weren’t your own and you can’t, you—” 

Bucky remains still, but there’s something of the ice in him that seems to melt, likely against his will.

“I love you,” Steve says with all the strength that love lends to his soul: “and not a single bit of it changes what I feel. Not even close.”

Bucky turns then, and he crosses the distance between them, and Steve doesn’t expect the hand behind his neck or the mouth on his, swift but so very very _real_ , and when Bucky draws back it’s not very far.

“When we’re done,” he says solemnly, eyes trained on Steve's with a gravity Steve’s feels through to the marrow in his bones: “When we’re done here, we’re gonna have a talk.”

And there’s a promise inherent in those words, and no matter what comes of what they see next, Steve will take it.

Steve with take it with both hands and relish it.


	11. 2016, Part III

The next time he feels the sensation of being dropped into his own past, or a parallel of that past, or whatever any of this is, he’s not surprised. 

This one, he expects.

“I don’t want you to go,” Steve says, because that’s all he’d wanted to say but he’d been trying to be a good man, he’d been wanting to support his best friend, his soulmate; to honor his choice when he’d been denied that simple right— _choice_ —for so long, but he won’t, _can’t_ pretend that doing so hadn’t ripped out pieces of his heart, and shredded much of what was left.

And Steve is selfish. If there’s anything he’s learned, it’s that he’s selfish and he’s selfish enough beyond that to not be ashamed of it. And to have no interest in apologising for it.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Bucky responds, voice gentle in a way Steve hasn’t heard in so long, it almost catches a sob in his throat. “I’m gonna be right here, Steve,” he tells him, and reaches out for his hand, tactile like they used to be a lifetime ago; a universe apart. “Safe and sound, until they can make absolutely sure,” he sighs, and squeezes Steve’s hand.

“If there’s a me—”

“There is a you,” Steve says, vehement and headstrong and a little bit heartbroken at so much as the suggestion otherwise. “Right _here_.”

Bucky smiles, though it’s more fond than happy, but Steve will take what he can get.

“If there’s a me that’s _only_ me, and not what they tried to make me, and damn near succeeded through and through, would have well enough if not for you,” he looks at Steve like he’s made of wonderful things when it’s anything but: stares into him with gratitude and something bordering on disbelief, and if there’s any joy in Bucky it seems to be directed at Steve, like seeing him brings Bucky something that’s even close to an echo of the almost-otherworldly thrill Steve feels when he looks at Bucky, when the feelings Steve holds for Bucky suffuse his body and make him feel thrice the man he is, just for the strength of it, the immutable, undying power. 

“I can’t risk it,” Bucky shakes his head, and Steve can’t bear it, so he speaks what he can bear, what he’s borne all his life:

“I love you.”

Bucky starts at that, eyes darting to Steve’s.

“What?” he asks, voice low and tone shocked, but he doesn’t move his hand from Steve’s.

He doesn't move his hand, so Steve turns his own in their grasp and presses their palms together, studying the way it looks: right. 

It looks _right_.

“I love you,” Steve repeats it, hoping that saying it again makes it stronger, makes it better reflect how much of his heart’s in it; how much of his heart’s _Bucky’s_. “I love you and I don’t want to lose you.”

“You’re not gonna lose me,” Bucky’s answer is immediate. “I’ll be back before you can miss me, Steve. They’re sharp as tacks, here. They’ll figure it all out quick.”

“I already miss you,” Steve says the words, but it’s hard. It’s hard to say them, hard to admit this is happening, that he loses here, again. “Just the idea of this,” Steve gestures at the technology surrounding them vaguely; “just this makes me miss you.”

Bucky’s face falls and he pulls Steve to him.

“Come here,” and he presses Steve’s body to his and Steve goes so willingly, so desperately and Bucky talks to him, holds him, and Steve doesn’t realize he’s shaking until Bucky’s hand is soothing down his spine.

“You’re what saved me,” Bucky whispers, holding Steve so close, so fucking _close_ and Steve leans into him all the harder, puts his entire weight into Bucky’s chest and Bucky just cradles him as best he can, kisses his temple and lets him soak in the reality of Bucky, the life of him for as long as he can. “Let me do the rest, okay?”

He lays his hands on Steve’s shoulders and eases him back, just enough to rest his forehead on Steve’s and breathe against his skin:

“Let me say it back to you as all of me, not just part of me.”

And it’s a promise; it’s pure and clear intent and it’s testament that Bucky feels it too, Bucky wants like Steve wants and he wants it to be unadulterated, though Steve doesn’t agree that to be offered now would be anything less: but Bucky.

Bucky wants to give him a heart that _Bucky_ deems worthy. Bucky wants to give what Steve’s only ever dreamed of holding in return.

“Okay,” Steve says softly, though it kills him.

“Okay.” Bucky touches the tip of his nose to Steve’s cheek and breathes him in and Steve knows what happens next.

It doesn’t stop the hurting, as the moment, as Steve himself fades away.


	12. 2017

It’s simple, perhaps the simplest it’s ever been, of all the time and trials and errors and missteps and opportunities lost and found again. It’s the one he should have caught the first time, with both hands, and the one that’ll be the most appalling to lose now.

He’s been here a good dozen times already, he remembers this night specifically: definitely often enough that they’re left to themselves, nothing pressing to shore up or respond to, Shuri’s fitted him out with new uniforms and weapons ages ago now, and updated them at least twice besides; Steve’s been hugged by the King of Wakanda—just once, but it seemed like a momentous sort of thing; Bucky smiles easier, sweeter, and Steve’s heart grows big in his chest every time he sees it, and he doesn’t know, really, how he kept it from singing out loud, kept it from speaking the truth the first time. He doesn’t know how he kept his mouth shut against the way his pulse thrums _happily_ , the way he _feels_ happiness for the first time in so fucking long, every time he’s in Bucky presence, every time he’s reminded that Bucky is alive and breathing and as well as he can possibly be and Steve gets to witness it, gets to share just a taste—

Steve’s not sure how he kept the words behind his lips the last time, but he damn well won’t do it now.

They’re both stretched out lazily in front of a glittering lake reflecting the amethyst sunset back at them, and Bucky’s bathed in that light as he watches, and Steve can’t help but watch him: the sky is gorgeous, but Bucky’s fucking mesmerizing.

“I love you,” Steve says, unprompted but then again, it never needed prompting. Not really. He's almost afraid that Bucky didn’t hear him, or worse, is ignoring it out of kindness, or pity; but just as Steve’s about to collapse inward, a smile spreads slowly across Bucky’s lips.

“I know it,” he drawls a little, and Steve’s transported to another time and place, another sunset sparkling in those gorgeous blue-grey eyes with Steve’s fingers aching to _touch_.

“I’m _in_ love with you.” Steve doesn't think before he says it; something in him just needs to make sure he’s understood, through and through, to make sure that smile’s a thing he gets to fold away in his chest and keep for real, and maybe see again, and again, if he’s lucky.

If he’s being _understood_.

He watches Bucky carefully, who’s still just smiling at the sunset, limbs loose as he watches the colors dance.

“Yep,” Bucky nods; “that too.”

Steve doesn’t know what to do, having been expecting the worse or else expecting _something_ , but Bucky’s just glowing in the streaming, dampening light and maybe that’s what Steve should have been expecting: warmth, and light, and a sense of completeness that’s quiet, where it’s only ever been loud, been fraught, been on borrowed time before.

Then Bucky finally turns, and looks at Steve straight on, and if anything, he glows brighter.

His smile widens.

“Kinda always have been, haven’t we?” he asks, and that warmth, that light, that completeness.

Steve realizes, in that very instant: those sensations are all in the way Bucky’s looking at him. Those things are all the truth of _Bucky’s_ love in return.

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, his own lips smiling wide enough to crack his face; 

“Kinda.”

They don’t rush it; they watch the sun descend the horizon first, and when they come together it’s natural in a way that feels like it belongs to Steve’s own flesh and blood. Bucky undresses him slowly, and Steve’s so lost in the feeling of those hands on his body that he doesn’t return the favor until he’s already stripped naked.

Bucky settles himself between Steve’s knees, and Steve spreads his legs wide; Bucky looks at him, as if taking the measure of his desire in with his just his eyes and Steve thinks he probably can, Steve thinks he’s probably as open and vulnerable and thrumming-searing _alive_ as he’s ever been and Bucky’s being sings on the same octave as Steve’s, and always has, so Steve thinks Bucky can read what he wants by just looking, just watching Steve’s heaving chest, heart pumping hard enough to see through the skin: Bucky’s.

All Bucky’s.

And Bucky sees it. Bucky takes it and leans down and runs hands over Steve’s sides and down across his nipples, thumbs playing with them just at a touch as he moves lower, leans closer to press his lips to Steve’s skin and suck bruises down the center, goddamn worshipping his body as he licks flat against the creases of Steve’s thighs, teases fingers back as he eases Steve’s legs up and out atop his shoulders and takes Steve’s length just to the tip between his lips, tongue swirling languidly as his fingers press Steve’s entrance: Bucky sees his want, and all that he’s willing to give Bucky, heart and soul, and he meets it.

He meets it, and takes it gratefully, and gives back in kind, and Steve could sob for it, if he weren’t so goddamn distracted by the pleasure Bucky’s wringing from his body, driving him to the edge of different sobs entirely. 

Bucky inside of him is something Steve has no frame of reference to describe, the sensations and the emotions and the way he claws at Bucky’s back with every thrust, lazy and full, the way he sinks in like it’s simple gravity and the way the world was made, like he’s living inside it and loving it as much as Steve is and maybe he is, maybe it’s possible that he _does_ somehow love as much as Steve does, something Steve never imagined he could have, that he could know, and _yet_ —

Bucky fills him, trembles against his body and into and through him because he’s a part of Steve, undeniably, and the sun’s set wholly now but all Steve can see is unmitigated light.

When Steve lies awake, studying Bucky’s sleeping form, tracing the shape of his profile in the moonlight, the idle thought that _this_ is what will change things, that not just speaking love but making it, that this is what he couldn’t die without: it should make him sad, and it does, because if this is the last he ever sees of Bucky in this world it will indeed break him, but the stretch of Bucky in him is still fresh and Bucky’s chest rises and falls and he’s so alive, he’s so _alive_ and Steve loves him, and Bucky—

Steve is pretty sure Bucky loves him, too.

It’s a gift, that he doesn’t disappear from this world until he’s fallen asleep pressed against Bucky’s body, Bucky’s arms having come to wrap around him even in sleep: so warm.

So real, and so warm.


	13. 2018

Steve’s sick to his goddamn stomach, this time. Because this is beyond his control, beyond his changing, and there’s no way he can make this end differently, there’s no changing anything but creating more heartbreak; he’s wondering if it’s more of a kindness to do nothing, if this one’s a mistake. To tell Bucky he loves him, then when Thanos, when it happens, when _Bucky_ —

Steve doesn’t know if he can do it. To either of them. He’s even less sure that he should.

“Bucky.”

But the point of this, the point of this is just to share love, isn’t it? Much as it hurts, and it does hurt, because Steve has to leave every time and he’s selfish but maybe he’s selfish for himself, to lose the man he loves after having him so short a time, after _wasting_ so much time, but maybe it’s something bigger, something he’s meant to give regardless of the cost to his own self, his own heart—

“I gotta,” Steve starts, trying to chart his course, his way to say this quick and unadorned and maybe out of nowhere but still with all due feeling, but—

“Shut up,” Bucky says, dragging him around a corner beyond anyone’s notice, pulling Steve hard enough that he presses full against his chest.

“Something big is coming, Steve,” Bucky breathes, urgency in every syllable, and just a little hint of well-deserved fear. “And we might not get outta this one,” he looks Steve hard in the eyes: “this might be where we stand and fall.”

And Steve knows it’s true, because Steve fell the moment Bucky disappeared from this world; in Steve’s chest, in Steve’s mind, in the whole of his body and all of his soul Bucky was gone, and he may not have known it then but he took Steve with him.

At least, this way, he’ll know. They won’t be alone anymore.

“So let’s not waste _time_ ,” Steve says, grabbing Bucky’s jacket and hauling him up, locking his eyes with heat this time and making his intentions entirely clear in his gaze; “not any more time.”

Bucky moves first, lips parted to consume Steve as soon as they make contact, crashing into each other like the world is ending and, and— 

“Love you,” Steve bites against Bucky's bottom lip, hands roving through his hair, across his chest, his hips.

“Fuck,” Bucky moans, and grinds against Steve’s hardening length with fervor; “ _fuck_ , I love you too,” and Steve’s pulse skips and he devours Bucky’s all the more ardently, pulls him closer by the hips he holds and they gasp and groan into each other’s mouths like it’s the only home they’ve ever known.

“Get this off,” Bucky pulls at Steve’s uniform; “now.”

It’s a task, but Steve’s happy to meet it; Bucky’s impatient though, and damn near rips the material, reinforced against every known weapon to be used against it: it’s fitting that it nearly meets its end at the ravenous hands of the man Steve would give all he is to keep.

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve moans as Bucky undoes every buckle and catch on the uniform, stripping Steve to the waist before pressing him back and biting down his torso, Steve knocking his head hard against the wall as the breath rushes out of him.

“I love you,” Steve gasps; “I fucking love you, I have always loved you, love _is_ you, you’re my fucking heart and _soul_ —”

“You’re the love of my life, you goddamn punk,” Bucky growls against his skin. “Survive this, do you hear me? All you do is survive against all odds, all my life I’ve set my world around that fact and so you’ve got to,” Bucky runs lips over the muscles of Steve’s abs, presses lips to the lowest pulse he can find there. 

“You’ve _got_ to.”

“Only if you do the same,” Steve says without thinking, and he almost breaks down. Thankfully, Bucky’s undoing the lower half of his uniform and peeling it back to free his cock and take it between his lips with a hunger Steve matches, but can’t quite embrace for the pain in his chest because he knows; he knows—

And this is the last time. Steve’s not sure how he knows it, but he knows it when the vortex takes him back, it feels different. He’s not travelling, he’s returning to something permanent. He’s come to his end and maybe that’s the point. Maybe at the end of the world, he had to give himself to break into even smaller pieces, he had to come apart more irreparably than before, in order to earn his rest, to earn whatever comes next.

Whatever he thought was the worst he could know, the thing that would end him entirely, he’d survived it.

He had to be broken enough to truly die, to earn it through and through, and this is the end.


	14. 2024

The time he spends in the matrix, in the swirling monochrome of potentialities to the point of sickness and coming undone: the time he spends like that feels endless. He wonders if this is what comes after; he wonders if this is Hell.

When he lands, though: it is soft. It is warm.

The ringing that filled his ears subsides, and is replaced by something oddly familiar, oddly soothing and rhythmic.

Breathing. It’s the sound of breathing.

He’s in a bed. And he’s not alone.

He wasn’t done. He wasn’t done but he doesn’t know where he is.

He stays very, very still and takes stock of his surroundings, as his senses return to him. Or else, he tries to, but the first sense that returns evidence to him is the cadence of the breath beside him, and the truth of scent when he inhales: he knows both, intimately, better than he knows the beat of his own heart.

“Steve?”

Oh, and that voice, clouded and soft with sleep; that voice around his name.

Steve can’t swallow. He doesn’t know what this is—it still could be a hell of some sort, toying with him. He’s desperate to reach out but he’s afraid that he’ll meet thin air, that this is a dream or a trick.

He’s never been here before. He knows he’s never been here before. He’s never shared a bed with Bucky before like this after he fell, after he—

“Closer,” Bucky groans, reaching back and patting the bed between his body and Steve’s, almost close enough to meet Steve’s hand and _touch_ —

It’s a lie. It has to be a lie but Steve moves closer against his own wishes, against all the things his soul can’t stand.

He rolls as close as he can to Bucky’s body without making contact. He’s still too scared, and after everything, _everything_ he won’t be able to stand it, he won’t survive if he’s survived at all, if this isn’t just damnation and temptation and: 

Bucky groans again, and gropes for Steve’s hand; finds it quick and stops Steve heart in his chest.

It’s solid. It fits Steve’s own hand just like it always had, every time.

“You’re so warm,” Bucky murmurs dazedly, and promptly falls back into the rhythmic breathing of sleep, and Steve can’t breathe. Steve can't breathe, but then he feels Bucky’s heat against him in kind and Steve doesn’t care just then if he’s condemned, if the universe forgot to end it and he gets just this one fantasy before the real close, he doesn’t care—

He wraps his arms around Bucky’s waist and presses against his back like a safe haven and is selfish, so selfish, and he buries his face in the nape of Bucky’s neck and prays for this purgatory never to end.

____________

“What the _hell_?”

Steve startles awake, realizing in slow pieces that he’s in bed, he’s alone, and he shouldn’t be, and that voice.

He turns to it immediately, because it’s shaking, and it’s near but still too far, and it’s...scared.

It sounds scared, and it’s Bucky’s voice. Bucky should be in bed, but he’s not, and instead he’s out of arm’s reach and he’s scared.

Steve begins to think that the whole Hell theory is making more sense. Give him a taste and then crush his foolish fucking heart beneath the boots of unending punishment. He’s heard enough sermons on the subject in his youth to figure it adds up.

“No, no,” Bucky’s standing at the other side of the room, plastered against the wall as he shakes his head almost compulsively, almost pendulously, eyes wide enough to look like it hurts. 

“I’m past this, I fucking got _past_ this,” he murmurs to himself, and Steve can’t help it; he sits up and makes to stand, to move closer and help, somehow _help_ even though, if he’s being punished, he’ll fail and it’ll hurt more, but he can’t not.

He can’t _not_.

“Don’t.”

The sharpness, the harsh, raw edge of the word from Bucky’s throat stops Steve still.

“Don't, you,” he’s still shaking his head, but his expression is crumbling farther in on itself with every second, and he breathes only to let it gain some purchase, to reset before coming apart entirely, one step forward and two straight back. 

“You disappear, every time, you disappear before I wake up and that’s,” Bucky’s voice cracks, and the sound of lost words, the lost breath makes something crack just as fierce, shatter just as hard in Steve’s chest. 

“And I can live with that, that’s enough, so long as I don’t have to watch you…” he gestures vacantly, but stops quickly when he seems to lose purchase, grasps desperately at the wall behind him like he needs it to stay upright.

“But before, when, when I,” Bucky flounders, blinks too quick and seems to be fighting between staring at Steve like he’s a ghost or like he’s heaven-sent, or looking away from him like he can make some sort of horrible nightmare stop if he does.

“When you what?” Steve ventures, when Bucky’s breathing gets too fast for comfort.

“When all I _did_ was see you!” Bucky snaps, heels of his palms pressed against his eyes, and Steve thinks the emotion he might be pressing back there just gets stuck in his throat, in his words. 

“But touching you, I couldn’t, you’d,” Bucky’s expression almost gives then, hands pulled away from his eyes and leaving them unguarded, pulled down so he can look at them, like those hands were the enemy not because of what they’d done—he’d looked at them that way for a long time after he remembered everything, Steve knows—but because of what they apparently failed to do when Steve was, when he saw _Steve_ , after—

“I can’t,” Bucky pushes himself away from the wall and starts pacing rapidly, hands fisting in his hair as he murmurs over and over as he walks back and forth: “I can’t go back to this, I _can’t_ —”

“Bucky?” Steve can’t help but speak, because watching this is painful; watching _Bucky_ in so much pain itself is _painful_. “You okay?”

Bucky stops, and spins on Steve, and nearly shouts at him:

“Do you have _any_ idea how much it hurts?”

Those words carry in them the entire process of a heart between when it beats and when it breaks and then it stops. Steve’s breathless for hearing it, punched straight with the sound against his sternum, stuttering his own pulse off-rhythm for the force. 

“Of course you do, or,” Bucky runs hands over his face and through his hair; “or don’t, you’re not real, you’re, you, we lost you and I...”

He breathes heavy and long and deep, still too fast and Steve can see the blood his nails are digging out of his palms for the force of the fists he’s making and Steve has the unbearable urge to reach and uncoil those fingers and kiss the tips of them and never let them cause harm, never let Bucky _come_ to harm, ever again. He’s been through their lives twice, now, and he’s seen so much hurt and maybe this is eternal rest, maybe this is pain forever, maybe this is what he’s always meant to feel: almost, but not quite. The best he can be, but still not enough, and he’ll have to watch it at arm’s length, failure after failure acted out in technicolor with just enough of a taste in the middle to remind him how hard to hurt: maybe that’s what this is going to be.

But Steve’s a fool, goddamnit, he’s a fool: if he gets those reminders, those tastes for the rest of his penance after a life he realizes now was fucking _full_ of things he took for granted or let slip by; if this is what he suffers, then it’s worth it.

The tastes are worth it, he can already tell. They will be worth it, from now until the end of all things.

“I’m never going to get over it, am I? Not really. Fucking kidding myself,” Bucky’s pressed against the wall again, and he slides down it, knees drawn up so his arms spill over and his head buries between them; Steve hears when the tears come, once his face is hidden—he thinks that’s Steve’s a hallucination, but he still doesn’t want him to see the breakdown on display. 

“It’s been months, almost a _year_ and it doesn’t hurt any less,” Bucky gasps out. “Some days I think it hurts more but it’s been so long since I saw you, like this, in the light of day,” and he doesn’t even look up _to_ see, just shakes from the shoulders and breathes heavy in the quiet of the room. 

“I thought I was doing better, managing it,” Bucky scoffs wetly; “past _this_ much, at least.”

He looks up then, eyes red but dry, now, mostly.

“And I can’t even tell you to go away, even when I know you’re not,” Bucky’s lips move around lost words before he huffs again, bitter as anything and the sting hits Steve, too. 

“I can’t say even say the words, can’t even say that you—” Bucky confesses almost shamefully, entirely hatefully, and there’s that sound, that sound like a heart beating and then when it stops. 

“I never want, I _never_ —”

He shivers, full body, and gets to his feet again and he looks at Steve, and Steve looks at him, and it’s in those moments where Bucky’s looking at him and through him all at once that Steve starts to process the words that are scratching unforgivingly at Steve’s soul; he starts to follow them a little closer, for reasons he can’t quite piece together save that they’re Bucky’s words, and they’re hurting Bucky; Steve starts hearing the words instead of trying to staunch the bleeding.

 _It’s been almost a year_—

“And now I’m fucking talking to you, like,” Bucky laughs the most ugly laugh Steve’s ever heard: in war, in combat, in life and death, from villains and enemies on the battlefield; nothing’s ever been such a hateful thing as the laugh that comes out of Bucky, so filled with self-loathing, and the idea of Bucky being hated, by anything or anyone but maybe worst by himself: Steve can’t stand it.

“Please,” Bucky’s begging now, maybe not of Steve, maybe of the same universe that’s been playing with Steve this whole time, maybe of time itself: “stop, just stop, _please_ —”

And Steve’s on his feet

“Steve?”

“Buck,” Steve says softly, and doesn’t reach, not yet. Maybe he’s afraid he’ll disappear, too.

“What,” he swallows hard; “ _when_ did you...” And Steve, it seems, can’t say it either. But the fact remains that for all the times that Steve’s lost Bucky?

There’s only one time, _one time_ where Bucky could have lost Steve, the time when Steve was afraid that the mission would take him alive even if he was supposed to come back to Bucky seconds later, even when he'd damn well promised it'd be okay, when Bruce swore it was safe, but when Bucky said he'd miss him like moments would be years and fuck, _fuck_ —

“We could see it,” Bucky says, words more breaths, more shapes of his lips than anything possible to hear. “The time matrix, when you, we could,” he shakes his head slowly, and his eyes are big like he’s seeing it again, here and now; Steve can see the pulse in his throat beat heavier, harder, faster as the moments string along, and that’s exactly what’s happening. Bucky’s seeing whatever the details, the things only enhance vision could pick up on in that quantum transfer of an instant; he's seeing Steve disappearing into the past, indefinitely, watching it happening all over again.

“When you went, when it took,” his voice cracks, and Steve thinks he’ll fall apart when the tear escapes Bucky’s eye, just one, and traces down his cheek painfully slow.

“I could see it, and you were supposed to come back, and I was afraid and it wasn't even supposed to be you, and by the time we knew anything was wrong it was too late to stop you and then there was nothing, I couldn’t even _reach_ ,” and his hand is almost stretched far enough to touch Steve’s face but it freezes as soon as he realizes it; his eyes meet Steve’s and they’re filled with so many more tears, so much more feeling.

“There was nothing to do, I couldn’t even _try_ ,”and that’s the sound: the sound of the heart and the beating-breaking-stopping: it’s that, in his eyes. It makes something in Steve wither just to see. 

“Broke my heart, Steve,” Bucky whispers, entirely diminished in a way that he never should be because Bucky’s survived so much, so much more than anything Steve could embody, even the loss of him, but _this_ is what breaks him and that can’t _be_ —

“Goddamn broke my heart.”

And that’s what breaks Steve, too; and Steve just turns his head a little, tilts it just so, so that the hand Bucky never thought to retract makes contact with his cheek and Bucky stills, breath catching so sharp it sounds painful, and Steve sighs, nearly moans at the contact and just leans into it, greedy and desperate and the touch is so warm, and Bucky's hand spreads out, fingertips splaying like discovering something unbearably fragile, something cosmic, something unexplained and desperately desired and full of fear in failing it entirely, and, just, just like...

Oh.

Oh, but what _if_ —

“It’s worse now, isn’t it? When I thought it was getting better?” Bucky whispers, finger twitching, drawing minutes circles into Steve’s skin. “If I can touch you, and you’re just in my head—”

“I’m not,” Steve says, tries it on his tongue to see if it fits the way it’s growing hopeful in his chest. This rings like the energy, the universal mystery that delivered him to every missed opportunity in his past but at the very same time, this is new. This is new and _almost a year_ and what if, what if there were opportunities yet to be had and he’d been sent not just to fix but to learn, to learn how to hold them and learn how to lay foundations to make them last, what _if_ —

“I’m not, I,” Steve says it again, and it feels solid when he does. Bucky just blinks at him, not comprehending the way Steve can feel his own expression starting to dawn with tentative, but genuine wonder. 

“I think I’m _here_ ,” he looks up at Bucky, drinking him in and trying to see if he can grasp what it could mean to stay forever in this moment, and all the moments to follow, where Bucky is solid against his hands but isn’t just temporary, isn’t something that will get lost. 

“Finally.”

Bucky’s looking at him like he’s an incomprehensible puzzle, and maybe he is, but Steve’s heart is starting both to pound and put itself together, all at once, and scrambling frantic mess of new-dawning, only-half-possible joy.

“When is it?” Steve asks; “Now, I mean. How long, did you say, since?”

“Coming up on a year,” Bucky looks dumbfounded for a second at the question, before it morphs straight into sorrow. “More often than not I didn’t think I’d survive it,” he whispers, confesses: 

“Still don’t think I’m gonna survive it much longer.”

“Don’t say that,” Steve damn near growls at him, takes the hand still on Steve’s cheek and grabs for the other one and holds Bucky’s wrists in his grasp like a touchstone to what the here and now could be. “Don’t fucking say that—”

“Why?” Bucky asks, half-a-challenge, but only half; the rest is still sorrow. “You’re not _here_ and I—”

“But I am here,” Steve says again, as strong as he can, because he’s starting to believe that it’s true. “And I _love_ you.”

And that he says, stronger than anything, because it will _always_ be true.

“I love you.”

Bucky blinks at him, and there’s a leftover tear on his lashes that goes free across his cheekbone, but is still, more than still: stunned stiff, doesn’t even appear to breathe.

“Buck?” Steve asks gently, carefully, not wanting to spook him but desperately needing to hear his voice, for better or worse—

“You never say that,” Bucky whispers hoarsely. “I’ve wanted it, but then I always thought it was better, maybe, that my head didn’t gouge at my heart that deep but...”

He steps closer, and Steve can feel the heat of his breath, and it shakes, trembles out in little puffs of desperate air and then Steve notices the shaking is everywhere, clear in the hands Steve’s holding onto for dear life..

“You’ve never said _that_.”

“I do,” Steve says, and musters the strength in that truth that holds his soul together. “I love you more than life, or death. I love you in a way I’m not sure anyone’s ever loved before because I _have_ loved you through life and death and I only love you all the stronger for it, all the bigger and I can hardly hold it,” he huffs a disbelieving, grateful breath for that fact and takes a half step closer, so that when he breathes in it’s Bucky’s air; when his lungs expand it’s to touch Bucky’s chest against his own.

“And all I’ve wanted, for longer than I can say or stand is to stop holding it back and just give it. Give it straight to you so maybe it’ll light you up like it glows in my chest and I,” Steve slides his hands from Bucky’s wrists to press their palms flush, the match uncanny. 

“If you want it, I want to give it to you to hold and keep, that and more. Now and always. Forever.”

Bucky stares at their not-quite-joined hands, pressing weight against Steve’s touch like a test, like he can’t believe quite yet.

“How can I prove to you that I’m not in your head?” Steve asks him, begs for an answer he can make happen, make as real as he is, because he _is_.

Real.

“Because if I’m in your head then you’re in mine,” Steve reasons, impassioned; “and if that’s the case that just seems like the real world, doesn’t it? You’re in every part of me, all the time,” Steve says, the words growing harsh as his throat gets tight. “And if you, if you ever could—”

He’s not expecting Bucky’s mouth on his but he knows the feel of it now like a second skin, a firmer heartbeat and so he knows when to open and where to move and how to give, and god _damn_ does Bucky give, and take, and sucks Steve’s tongue fierce, licks around his mouth like he’s trying to map and test and tease all at once, like he can answer the questions of the entire universe if he tongues it out of Steve’s mouth and _god_ , Steve can barely stand it, can barely keep from pushing it further and feeling all of Bucky, giving him everything—

The suddenness of Bucky pulling away makes Steve whimper, and his eyes, he knows, are sad when they meet Bucky’s, but only for a moment. Only for a moment because Bucky’s eyes are shining, and the wonderment is back, and it’s only tinged with fear, with hesitation.

The wonderment is what speaks loudest.

“I don’t know how you taste,” Bucky says simply, softly, touching fingers to his lips. “I didn’t know until now but you’re everything I imagined and so much I didn’t, couldn’t...”

And Steve sees the realization as it sinks into Bucky’s bones. Steve isn’t what he imagined.

Maybe Steve isn’t something he’s imagining at all.

“Steve?” And Bucky’s voice is small, and when Steve looks at him he looks like he’s had the weight of the world rolled off of him after being bowed by it too long, and his body isn’t sure yet that it’s really over, that he can stand straight and lift his chest tall and open his heart again: it’s not sure yet.

Steve will goddamn make sure he _knows_.

“Yeah?”

Bucky dares to take Steve’s hand, line up the lines in their palms and thread his fingers through, and leads him back to the bed even though the sun’s already started streaming through the blinds.

“Be here again, still,” he says as he sits, then stretches out; it’s a statement, and a wish; a plea and a command and a hope all at once; “when I wake up.”

And Steve doesn’t let go of his hand, and lies down beside him, and runs his free hand through Bucky’s hair and whispers close enough to feel it warm on Bucky’s lips: 

“Always.”


End file.
